📍Ivy House, North End Road, London NW11 7SX, UK
1912 – 1931“In 1912, with my partner and manager, Victor Dandré, I bought Ivy House, an elegant Georgian house on North End Road, on the edge of Hampstead Heath in north London. It had a huge old garden and a lake, said to have been painted by Turner, and I filled it with swans, ducks, flamingos and other birds. After years of touring the world, this was the first place I could call home, and after the Russian Revolution of 1917 it became my permanent home; I never went back to Russia. I spent hours by the lake with my swans, and my favourite, Jack, would let me hold him in my arms. Watching them helped me deepen my most famous role, The Dying Swan, created for me by Mikhail Fokine in 1905. Ivy House was also a working place: I had a rehearsal studio built, where my company devised and rehearsed ballets, and costumes and scenery were made and stored, and I taught young English girls there, training dancers for my touring company. I loved my garden, my flowers and my birds, and the peace I found there between the long, exhausting tours that took my company to every corner of the world, from India to South America. I danced for millions of people who had never seen ballet before, and inspired a generation of dancers, including the young Frederick Ashton, who saw me in Lima and decided to become a dancer. Ivy House has had many lives since, and a blue plaque now marks the house where I lived with my swans.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today